Paid Advertising (Pay-Per-Click) – Traffic Overload

Paid advertising is the art of creating ads for your site and paying either a search engine like Google, Bing or social media, Facebook to post your ads up in their pages. I use the word art as you will find that as time goes on, you will get the knack of creating ads about your niche, paying pennies per click.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is the art of paying pennies per click every time someone clicks on your ad. It is possible for thousands of people to see your page (impressions) and get clicks that can cost a lot of money or pennies depending on your keywords. Are you getting my drift?

If not, let me show you 2 ads I made using Bing Ads.

This one, with the target audience being bloggers, is all about

keyword selection and it’s importance for ranking high in Google.

There is a call to action in the last line of the ad

The ad below is targeting Mums who want to earn online while at home. The call to action is the same as the first ad. Now, you would think that the first ad would draw in plenty of traffic because most bloggers are concerned about ranking on the first page of Google instead of page 10. However, it is the 2nd ad about Mums that got the most traffic and most clicks.

I used many keywords in the first ad – keyword, site rank, ranking high, etc. However, none of these keywords were searched and clicked for according to Bing ad statistics. The word ‘blogger’ was searched for though and also I used the keyword ‘mums’ for this ad.

In the second ad, where ‘Mums’, ‘work at home’ , ‘earn money online’ keywords and phrases were used, these were clicked on in the thousands. Only paying up to £0.20 per keyword.

Notice the Play On Words

In the text of the ad, I used ‘earn money online at home’. In the ad title, I said ‘work at home online’. Both phrases are meant to attract people who want to earn money online while at home. If repeated once in the title and also slightly rearranged for the ad text, the meaning is emphasised.

So when you write your ads whether it be for Google Adwords, Bing Ads or Facebook Advertising, it is important to have a good title, target your audience in that title, then use a different explanatory phrase in the first line of the ad text. Followed by a call to action in the second line.

You only have a few words to play around with so practice is a good idea in being ‘Twitter-like’ and catchy with your ad creation.

Ad Split-Testing

This just means 1 or 2 ads with different variables that are directed to achieving the same goal. For example, I could have made an ad for Mums like this –

Ad 1

Mums – Money Can Be Earned At Home

Online With Training Given

Find Out How – Join Now

Ad 2

Mums – Earn Money Online At Home

Training Provided

Join Now to Find Out How!

Within a few hours of your ad going live, you will be able to see with the statistics provided, which of the ads is performing better and for what keywords. Any non-performing keywords can be deleted and the winning keywords can be ramped up in spend.

As the screenshot was blurry, I have typed the Bing ad statistics for you to have a glimpse at. They are for my first ads mentioned in the beginning of this post.

Ad 1

Keyword Bid Clicks Impr. CTR Avg. CPC

bloggers 0.20 31 996 3.11% 0.12

Ad 2

work at home 0.28 206 9,722 2.21% 0.10

earn money online 0.29 118 5,156 2.29% 0.11

blogging 0.22 15 903 1.66% 0.09

blog at home 0.10 1 7 14.29% 0.04

I know this seems confusing at first, but I will break this down for you – alright?

Bid – this is how much I budgeted for a keyword

Clicks – how many people clicked on and read my posts on my site

Impr. – how many people saw my ad in their search engines

CTR – the click through rate – how many people are clicking through to your ad in percentages.

Avg. CPC – average cost per click

The important thing to remember is that you want high clicks for low average cost per click. You may have to practice and test quite a few ad variations to get the cost per click low and the clicks and the click-through rate high.

I have noticed that bids for keywords that are money related and mention ‘money’ are higher than perhaps ‘bloggers’ or ‘site rank’.

Paid Advertising Pros

With paid advertising though you are paying for your ads to be on the first page of search engines, the good thing is that you do not need to depend on organic search or SEO tactics. You can get traffic to your site immediately and start raking in profits after your ads have been up at least for one week.

You can set your adspend to daily and manual so as not to run way above your budget.

When you find a well performing ad, you can scale up and let this ad rake in the profit.

Cons

You may need to really practice at getting your ads catchy and informative enough. Also you will need to have a set budget to pay for your ads. You can make the most of Bing’s free £75 voucher for your first set of ads.

You really have to watch your adspend and start small – £20 per week until you see the better performing ads out of the ones you have crafted.

Facebook Advertising

Most people who have a computer or smartphone use Facebook to connect with their friends. I use Facebook to connect with my secondary schoolmates. However, I dabbled in learning Facebook Advertising in 2015 and am currently doing my second course as Facebook has changed a lot over the last 3 years.

The good thing about advertising on Facebook is that you have a very well targeted audience. Age, gender, interests, job title, spending range, location are all variables that can be used to target your audience very specifically.

In 2015, I boosted a page for Juicing for Weightloss. Even though I hardly post on it, I now have over 300 likes because I boosted the page twice in 3 years. I am getting likes every day.

Now, when it comes to business purposes, obviously I would have to make sure that I am on Facebook engaging with my audience at least twice a day. Also posting daily to inspire my audience.

The rule of thumb is to inspire and educate your audience for 80% of the time and promote your product or service for 20% of the time. This is because Facebook is first and foremost a social networking site and not a shopping site like Amazon.

These days, it is possible to target your audience very finely and pay pennies per click. I am still on the Holy Grail to get there though! I am not even sure I will tell the world about it when I do as these days, keeping quiet while the money rolls in is considered wise.

Keyword Selection

You have to use keywords wisely when creating ads as keywords cost money. If you are wise, you will practice phrasing your keywords in such a way as to rank high for the average position, yet bid low. Like I said before, practice makes perfect.

You can use Jaaxy keyword tool and also find keywords from library books, Amazon search, magazines, forums, Google search and Trends, etc. Keep your eyes open and your antennae up to keep on the look out for keywords that will have everything to do with your niche.

Final Word

Everything I learn and show you here proves that Wealthy Affiliate training is not only affordable, but sticks in your memory. So why not sign up as a free Starter member to try it out?

If you have any comments or questions about paid advertising or keyword selection, I would love to hear from you.

The way I budget for Bing Ads is set the overall daily spend to £30 (or dollars). Then I set the bid price for my keywords at 15-30p.

When I see which keywords are being clicked the most and the average cost per click, I tweak it. I also delete the non-performing keywords. Once I find a really good ad out of the group I am using, I make a variation of that ad and scale that up. I might use a play on words and use a different variable as well.

I am in the process of learning more about 2018 Facebook Advertising. It has changed quite a bit from 2015. When I finish the Udemy course, I will do a Facebook ad campaign and also write up a post on here so that my results can be seen.

Facebook Advertising is WAY more targeted than either Bing or Google Adwords, so I could end up settling for Facebook in the end. Hope this helps!

Hi Stella!
This article is filled with important information. I am a new blogger and I and I am still learning how all this works. I have done Facebook ads before which have proven to be beneficial. They were very cheap too! I will be checking back to get more informed as I go through this journey! Best wishes

Hi Davona,
Blogging can give you a lot of insight and I even find it therapeutic!
Facebook Ads are cheap and very tightly targeted. I am looking forward to hearing how you do in the future…
All the best.

This is an amazing guide for newbies like me who rely on organic traffic to make money on the internet. Although I’m looking to explode my traffic and income, what you’ve presented here seem to be the next best choice for me. Even though it does take some time to perfect ads and begin profiting, I’m sure your article is going to help me succeed much faster 🙂 Cheers

As I am still in the learning curve, paid ads(PPC) is pretty new subject to me but your article has provided an in-depth valuable knowledge to me how to get the highest Return On Investment(ROI) on the money we spent.

But I am bit confused when you said to bid $0.22 but the Avg. CPC is $0.89 for the blogging keyword. Is that each click on blogging keyword cost $0.89 even though it was set to $0.22. If we set the limit $20 per week, it might easily over the budget with a very little click.

Hi Shui, thanks for noticing the different CPC rate. I checked my campaign and noticed that the Avg. CPC was actually £0.9 fr the ‘blogging’ keyword. My apologies for the error. I have corrected it on my post.

I must note that it is possible to only spend £20 or so dollars on weekly ads. The key is to pause your campaign during sleeping hours. Then continue the campaign during work hours. If you can get your clicks for 10p (c) or less than you will find your campaign can run for longer than 3 days.

Hope this helps, but if you have any more comments, please let me know.

Hi Stella,
A very helpful article, I have never tried paid ads before, maybe I’ll try it in the future.
What’s your opinion on Instagram ads, because Facebook’s engagement is dying while Instagram is growing really fast.
I’ve done some Instagram influencer marketing and I think it has a better result than ads.

I’m glad you found this article helpful. Paid ads are useful in reaching traffic worldwide fast..

As I have not used Instagram ads yet, I cannot give an opinion on them, However regarding the engagement on Facebook, you can have instant and quite long conversations with several people at the same time just by posting.

Whether it’s Instagram or Facebook ads you do, it is an art to market effectively on any Social Media platform. Once you master that, then you can go far.

Has anyone here tried the ppc? How effective will this ppc be? Let’s say a new created blog, just a few post. Nobody visits most of the time. Will this ppc help out? How much the price will be? Worth it? Sorry I am very curious. If it is good I may as well try it out once. Burn some money and put myself into the first page. Hope to rake some returns.

Pay per click (PPC) has nothing to do with ranking…You just pay what each keyword is worth. The idea is to pay a small amount per click. Online marketing is a very hot and expensive niche and you can pay up to $5 per click.

So you must be very careful. Set a low budget for 2-3 days and watch out for a runaway budget. Set a daily limit of not more than $10. You need to understand how to word your adverts for each campaign and some ads will perform better than others.

So keep practicing and put up some more blog posts with internal links and reviews. Your end result should be for people to buy from your site.

Let me add that pay per click is very useful and will get lots of traffic to your site in a few days. Facebook Ads is cheaper than Bing ads. You can track your ad campaign results with Google Analytics, (a bit more advanced).

Wow, this is great stuff. I like how detailed you were able to explain the terms used. It was all a jargon to me before this post. I am planning to try this industry soon but I’d like to know if the compensation would be reasonable in a month’s time?

Yes, Pay-per-click can be very addictive. The main thing is to learn how to get a high click-through rate for pennies or cents per click. Or in simpler terms, $1 in, $3 out as profit. It involves a lot of tweaking, but is worth it.

Once you learn PPC on one platform, you will be able to use the same strategy on others like Google Ads or Facebook Ads.

If you site is up and running, I would suggest you also set up an email campaign to engage with people who visit your site.

Great post, thanks for sharing your experience with us. I have just built a fresh new website and wondering if using paid ad like this will eventually raise my Google rank or not. And it would be great if you can do another detailed post about Facebook ads. I would love to learn about it 🙂

Paid ads are sponsored ads you see at the top of Page 1 on Google. For example, type Wealthy Affiliate into Google search. At the far left of each search result above the fold, you will see the word “Ad” in a small square box. These are PPC ads.

All you need to do is follow the WA training and you will find lessons on how to construct effective ads for Bing, by Kyle. PPC has nothing to do with you trying to rank. It puts your ad on Page 1 on Yahoo or Google depending on your budget for as long or little as you want.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask and definitely follow Kyle’s training on PPC for instant traffic.

Great post, thanks for sharing your experience with us. I have just built a fresh new website and wondering if using paid ad like this will eventually raise my Google rank or not. And it would be great if you can do another detailed post about Facebook ads. I would love to learn about it 🙂

PPC does not raise your Google rank…It does better than that by giving you instant traffic because you are paying Google or Bing/Yahoo to place your ads regarding your site on Page 1.

Once you get good at phrasing your ads, you will see you get A LOT of instant traffic. From all over the world The only downside is it depends on your budget and you have to monitor your budget spending and tweak your ad campaigns during the first 3 days or so until you notice which ad performs the best.

Then, put more money on the winning ad and stop the losing ads from wasting your money.

And always send your ads to a relevant post otherwise yoiur click through rate will be low.

I have dabbled (and am dabbling currently) in Facebook Ads, but Google Ads are just too scary for me for some reason. I feel I don’t understand SEA enough to make good ads. I suppose the same goes for Bing and Yahoo Ads. In your experience are Bing and Yahoo cheaper and easier to advertise with than Google?

PPC is really simple and much more effective than PPC on social media..People on social media are more interested in lifestyle than purchasing anything…It works out cheaper than Bing or Google but takes more time. I earnt my 1st £500 in 3 weeks when I was still a newbie in 2006. And it was my first 3 weeks at that.

The product I was promoting was a Clickbank product which just happened to be a hot one and I found $27 in my account every morning when I woke up..Some days it was 4 sales…

That’s what got me hooked on internet marketing in the first place. I only paid $27 for the product myself and got a $500 profit. Affiliate marketing rocks and so does WA!

There is nothing to be afraid of. Just test the waters and start with a small budget of £25 or dollars. Practise crafting ads according to Kyle’s training and see what happens.

It was nice in 2006, but as I was new I did not know the ropes and went for every shiny button catching my eye on the net for 12 years.
Why, because the product I was promoting got pulled and I found it difficult to find one as successful.

Lesson learnt – Develop multiple income streams instead of putting all your eggs in one basket!

Stella, thank you for making the pay-per-click concept a little more clear for me. I do have a question:

Let’s take your second ad in the examples…the one that was more successful. Looking at that same ad, just as it is, does Google decide your keywords or do you? I mean, do they look at your ad and say “there’s a keyword, there’s a keyword, that’s not a keyword” and so on then give you a bid chart for all of the key words they identified or do you say “I only want to use Make Money At Home”?

That part of this article is unclear, but I’m thinking about going PPC and It will help me budget to know this.

How well is the PPC concept working for you? I mean to ask, does it pay for itself every time, most of the time, sometimes or never?

Hi John I learnt all I know about PPC in 2006 by a person called Perry Marshall.

I learnt how to write effective, short and punchy ads. I also practised tweaking different ads in the same ad campaign with different wording or just rearranged the words.

I tend to prefer Bing Ads now, because Google have become rather expensive. I use Adwords iin 2006 when Google was still innocent..

Just make sure your ads make sense, just like classified ads do in daily newspapers. You will find plenty of examples of ad copywriting in these. The higher your budget, the more your ad will be shown. You really have to be careful and monitor your ads in the beginning so as not to go over budget.

Just start with £20 to see what the stats are for the day. Also choose countries like India and Australia…they are cheaper click-wise than the US or UK…

Once you get a winning add that is getting more clicks and impressions than the others, stop running the losing ads and focus your efforts and budget on the winning one.

I like the look of your example ads. They flow seamlessly with the browser colour scheme so they feel natural and not out of place. The repetition of words in different configurations is a is a good idea so thanks for that.

I think that paid advertising can be very beneficial if you use it correctly like you have. I think its better to get continuous comments and traffic rather than all at once, what do you think?

Thanks Stella for sharing and comments. I have found a lot more useful information which I needed to ask but luckily found it in your website. What a blessing. I wish one day to reach your level. I think I will be over the moon!!

Thanks for your kind words. Just keep being consistent and apply all the WA training regarding site creation, editing and marketing methods.. Keep testing your marketing strategy until you hit Bullseye! Success is only a matter of time and you can do this…

Hello Stella, I really appreciate your time and effort on writing this guide on PPC advertising.

The way you laid it out is perfect and informative, giving great examples of your own PPC campaigns. I have tried this before with Bing ads but haven’t been able to find a way to make it work. I really want to keep trying and testing but I’ve already spent around $100 and only made back something like $18 so I’m scared of losing more money. Thanks for this article though, it taught me some new things and maybe I’ll try again somewhere down the line.

You did a great job with your article. I tried PPC campaign once with Bing ads and it was going fine till my account was closed and i lost interest in it. With the huge information you just shared i will give it a second try and am sure i will get better results now because i now know better how to go about it.

This is a great post, Stella! Thank you for sharing. You really broke down the topic very well. I just have one question though, when advertising on Facebook, are you able to capture leads with without having a website? I haven’t ran a Facebook Ad yet, but want to run one in the near future.

Yes, you can capture leads without having a website. All you need to do is keep up with them on Facebook Messenger. I have 400 leads on a Juicing Page for Weightloss and even though it is not tied into my WA sites, I get at least 1 new Like a day.

Thank you for all this information. I started with Wealthy Affiliate only about a month ago and I am absolutely loving the training and the community support. I am just building up my very first niche/blog site and though I’ve heard of pay per click advertising before, I have never used it myself. When do you suggest beginning with PPC advertising? When the site is new? Or waiting until it is more established? Thanks again!

I am not at the stage to pay for traffic with ads but I will in the future. I think this post is a great way to get started to make ads. I really think this post holds great value, and I will definitely use it when I can finally make ads. Excellent post!

This blog is very important and helpful for new or beginners who want to earn with PPC. I heard that before that we can earn with this. But when i read your blog then i can understand how it is work. I am search for ad marketing how can i earn with ad then i found your blog and it inspire me a lot. Before i know that we can earn through ad but how i don’t know? When i read your blog it helps me a lot. Thanks for a wonderful and helpful blog.

And i have a question that as like “Facebook” can we earn money from “Twitter” through ads?

Also “THANKS FOR WONDERFUL BLOG” and give more and more information on online earning and also new trick.

Hi, although I am not intend on spending any money for paper click due to past favorite experiences, however I do have a question; do the paper click advertisements increase traffic on your blog and at the same time also rank you hire in the search engines? It will be good to know the answer to this from your own experience.